“Eastman Kodak Co. has lost a patent case against Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., dealing a blow to the onetime film giant’s efforts to raise billions of dollars by selling off its intellectual property,” Dana Mattioli reports for The wall Street Journal.
“Kodak filed a complaint against the iPhone and BlackBerry makers at the U.S. International Trade Commission in early 2010, saying their devices infringed on its patent for previewing images with a digital camera,” Mattioli reports. “Late Friday, the commission dismissed the complaint, upholding a finding by one of its judges that the patent was invalid.”
Mattioli reports, “As such, the commission concluded that neither Apple nor RIM had violated trade laws that could have led to an injunction halting imports of their products. Since the patent at issue was one of Kodak’s most valuable, the ruling raises fresh questions about how much money the company, now in Chapter 11, can raise from an auction that is expected to conclude next month.”
Read more in the full article here.
Toast. Hussein is next.
Get a clue, X – this is a technology forum and many, many of us here are getting tired of your need to politicize every news story posted here. You obviously don’t have anything substantive to add the discussion of Kodak’s IP assets (pretty dark down there in your mom’s basement, eh?), so why don’t you STFU?
Saddam Hussein is already dead. Do you mean Assad?
+1
No, the one who is screwing the USA .
Jean,
We all are growing extremely tired of your obsession with filling this comment section with incessant, mindless, and sophomoric anti-Obama rhetoric. If you can’t contribute something on topic and meaningful to these discussions, please restrain yourself from commenting. We’d all appreciate it.
+1,000,000
+1
Take any oppertunity to spread hate and lies.
Dern write!
There are probably only a few, perhaps even just one, anonymous loser responsible for most of the non-relevant political bait statements. This is just as much MDN’s fault as it is the losers, themselves. Why? Because MDN has repeatedly failed to respond to requests to allow only registered users to post to this forum.
There are other Mac forums, MDN. You can have your polititrolls. As soon as we leave, then they will leave and you will be left with nothing.
Considering that Kodak got its start in digital imaging with the help of Apple, I don’t feel bad that they lost this lawsuit.
Once a great company long since its useful life, it needs to finish dying so it won’t tie up resources, capital and labor that could go to more use with a living company.
True, but such a sad tale of piss-poor management not being able to see the writing on the wall.
Rim is next to follow IMO.
Agreed. As I’ve said here before, it’s ironic that the Blackberry’s once touted feature – its email – will be its undoing. IT departments are going to start defecting en mass because they don’t want to be caught with a non-functional email client the day RIM goes under. This mass defection will speed up RIM’s demise faster than any analyst realizes.
Wow, never considered that. Very interesting. I didn’t think RIM would last 9 months, now they may not last 4 months. That could be a serious implosion of the company in a spectacularly catastrophic fashion. Wow.
Sad for the employees tho, sucks to be out of work in this economy and have your pension blown up as well.
Also, given how long it takes for a large corporation to deploy phones to their employees, you can bet that your local IT doofus isn’t going to wait until the writing is on the wall to ditch their Blackberrys. I can even foresee them doing it ahead of any planned upgrade cycle.
On the subject of pension plans: in my country, contributions to a worker’s pension go to an account with a financial institution that manages pensions (hopefully well:), and are out of reach for the company, in case when it goes bankrupt. When one retires, one either receives an annuity or a lump sum from each of these pension plans.
I can only assume that is the case here. God bless these poor employees and may they find speedy reemployment with good companies.
Kodak invented the digital camera.
They failed to capitalize on it.
Kodak did the manufacturing of the Apple QuickTake cameras, some of the earliest consumer digital cameras on the market.
They failed to see the future.
It was Apple who tried to make them see the future. They even co developed a camera and some patents together. The same ones that they now sue Apple with. SJ wanted to help other companies succeed because he was once helped himself by Hewlett (or was it Packard) and never forgot it. Only thing is, everyone that SJ tried to help always stabbed him in the back…..Adobe, Google and Kodak to name a few. Even when he knew they stabbed him in the back he still tried to help them, as we can see by the last minute meeting he had with the present CEO of google.
Not sure that Jobs was at Apple when they worked with Kodak on this camera, but point taken. Apple has indeed worked with many companies and has not had a pattern of stabbing partners in the back like many have done to them.
Apple let Kodak use it’s digital IP’s for the use and development of the Apple Camera, it was called “Apple QuickTake”.
It was one of the first digital consumer cameras on the market, Kodak seemed to think it owned Apples IP in that area, but Kodak has misrepresented itself.
Kodak never did have the development of consumer cameras until it received IP from other company’s.
A once great company is now a shadow of itself.
Here is a link if anyone would like a brief rundown on the history of that device.
Here is the “Apple QuickTake” link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake
Sorry if this double Posts, first link didn’t show up.
No, they invented the CCD. As with most American companies, they were clueless as to exploiting the technology.
Film was a sacred cash cow for Kodak and they were caught in a situation that does not bother Apple at all and that is to obsolesce their own technology before someone else does. Of course it’s hard to make film but not as hard for others to make digital cameras so Kodak was always going to be on an uphill climb and would have had to innovate ahead of others as Apple does to keep ahead. Sadly Kodak consumer division for so long was garbage. Terrible design and poorly executed products.
I assume that X is trying to tell us that his IQ is 10. That would explain the stupidity of his posts, and be about right for a 12yr old piss ant.
Time to pull the plug on Kodak and let it die.
Sidelight: Fuji Film has spent the last decade diversifying…into medical products.
What did Kodak do over the last decade?
it slowly bled to death and died. It should have been out of business and liquidated awhile ago, but it’s clung to the patent troll cash cow on IP that never belonged to the company to begin with.